


The Music of the Desert is Fine.

by Bitsy



Series: The Wives [2]
Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 08:21:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4780391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitsy/pseuds/Bitsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the desert, before everything hurt. Before. There were some small slivers of beauty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Music of the Desert is Fine.

They all knew how to play. But Cheedo was the best. It wasn’t enough to just know the notes, to be able to read music. They could all do that, they’d figured that out within days. There were giant books full of music theory and clefs, treble and bass. There were quarter notes and eighth notes abounding, dozens of them, along with delicate Glissandos and Pianissimos. Beethoven and Bach and Brahms. So many wonderful men with names that started with the letter B, so many wonderful men who saw the beauty of life, aside from the bare ugliness of survival.

They all could play.

But Cheedo brought them to tears.

Her fingers along the keys weren’t merely physical. It was as if she poured her glass-spun soul into the notes, brittle. Brittle. Like glass. Hence the name. Cheedo was fragile, like her slim fingers along the ivory and ebony keys. Real ivory. Real ebony. Nobody in the modern world knew what those two substances were, especially here at the end of the world. Elephants? Trees? Holy shit, who had time for any of that? Nobody. Nobody at all. And yet Cheedo could play the best of all of them.

She shoved Toast aside, Toast who had the best grasp of the books in the corner, the best grasp of the cooking surfaces. Cheedo could make the delicate piano cry and weep and laugh and sigh. Cheedo could make the keys sit up and beg, ask a question that could never be answered in a million years, demand an accounting that would never be balanced. Hot jazz, cool classical, light comedy and heavy tears. Cheedo was queen of the keys, and nobody ever demanded their turn when she was seated on the plush bench.

“I wrote this one myself,” she offered shyly, smiling at her sisters in arms, before her fingers devastated them all, before she ripped open their souls with her own particular crescendos. It was a tune that had no basis in popular culture, of which she had zero knowledge. It wasn't a pastiche of everything she’d ever heard, subconsciously pulled together in a vaguely familiar melody. No. It was the first tune ever written for piano, the first real tune written by the first real human who'd ever touched the keys.

And it was devastating.

Toast just cried. So did Capable. Angharad just sat there, cradling her stomach with two hands.

Only the Dag had words for the concert that had just graced the Citadel’s unworthy walls.

“Smeg. You can’t save that for the end of the world, Cheedo?”

**Author's Note:**

> I am on tumblr at [BitsyFic.](http://bitsyfic.tumblr.com/)


End file.
